There’s a new Arcade Fire track! The sound quality isn’t great, but the song is:

Arcade Fire –Intervention

It’s perhaps not the most mind-blowing thing they’ve ever recorded. But I’m glad to hear it for two reasons. First, it isn’t a radical departure from their last album (I want more!). And second, it makes me think about what it’ll be like to once again see Winn Butler singing it like he’s never meant anything more, while the strings swell and the percussionists go crazy. More tour dates, please.

The above link is to a Coral Cache URL — it should hopefully work a little more snappily (and long-lastingly) than the original source, which still seems to be getting hammered (or maybe it’s just my connection). If your network blocks port 8090, head to the source.

Via stereogum, who picked it up from a BBC show.

Complaining about bad company Christmas parties? I’d like to get in on that.

Actually though, I haven’t been to too many office Christmas parties. I’ve usually been lucky enough to be out of town or otherwise busy on the date in question. But right before I quit my old job I did attend one at my boss’s house, and it wasn’t too bad. Over the course of the evening I watched the Irish guys who populated the office gradually get drunker, redder and angrier, which was more entertainment than I had been expecting.

Eventually the situation was defused by the dissemination of the holiday bonus giftcards. After that, everyone left within five minutes. It wasn’t a lot of fun, but it wasn’t that bad. No worse than sitting through church, anyway.

But I was subjected to some entertainingly bad Christmas gifts from that job. I shouldn’t really complain about the bonuses (or lack thereof) because I was generally compensated pretty well, particularly toward the end of my tenure. But there’s no excuse for this:

Yup, the first Christmas bonus I ever received was a button-up denim shirt with the company logo on it (and a friendly reminder that we were HUBZone Certified). And it was at least three sizes too large. Admittedly, I’m a computer programmer — it wasn’t wholly unreasonable to assume that I’d grow into it, so to speak. But size aside, there was no conceivable use for the shirt that didn’t involve the phrase “booth at a trade show”. It was more of a threat than a gift.

Things picked up, though. The next year I got some House of Representatives cufflinks that were actually kind of nice, but unfortunately not something that I would ever wear in this town. Call it a wash, I guess.

But my final Christmas at that job was indisputably great. The Amex gift card was a nice surprise, but the real treat was this:

I won it in the gift swap (my contribution to which was a pen that lit up when your cell phone rang, except actually didn’t). Pictures can’t convey how awful this ceramic sculpture is. I’ve seen this monkey elicit physical reactions of disgust in its viewers — it really does sort of make your skin crawl. This pleases me immensely, and it remains one of my most prized possessions.

But I think the era of the awful holiday party may be over for me — for now, anyway. EchoDitto’s is on Monday, and it promises to be pleasantly full of booze and food. I begged out of last year’s celebration since I hadn’t yet started the job, but by all accounts it was pretty fun. So I’m looking forward to this one. The only problem is that I’ve got nothing lined up for the gift swap. I suppose I could always bring the monkey, but I don’t think I’m ready to pass that torch just yet.

But where’s the can of Fosters and sharktooth-adorned hat?

Just to clarify:

In the meadow we can build a snowman

Then pretend that he is Parson Brown

He’ll say: Are you married?

we’ll say: No man

But you can do the job

when you’re in town

This is about fucking a (potentially magical) snowman, right? I may be missing something.

New header graphic, courtesy of C.P. Storm. Creative Commons = hereby satisfied!

I’ve got a couple of projects in the works centering around novel interfaces — specifically, some hijinks with Asterisk and my poor, neglected Arduino. The only problem with this is that it means I have to have something to interface with. Drat.

So, to resolve this issue I went ahead and wrote an implementation of Tetris in Processing. Since that’s kind of boring, I spent some additional time (okay, a lot of additional time) rewriting my one original contribution to the field of Tetrology: a fancy sinusoidal effect that I came up with in high school (let’s hear it for Pascal!). I hope you’ll find it as confusing as I do.

Of course, based on early reports from my expert beta testers, there’s a fairly decent chance that this will crash your browser. If it already has, uh, sorry. I’m sure you’ll take comfort in the fact that it runs fine on my machines.

UPDATE: That’s enough browser crashing for one day. I’ve moved the applet below the fold so that this website doesn’t mean instant death for affected users. It’s weird that this is happening — I don’t think I’m doing anything too exotic. And I’d expect Processing to protect me from causing these kinds of crashes (and expect the Java VM, upon which it’s based, to offer further protection). I guess that’s not the case. Well, maybe a future release of Processing will produce better results. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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Charles and I have now made a total of 15 visits to stores in an attempt to buy a Wii, including a number of trips where we got to the Best Buy/Toys R Us/Circuit City before it opened. Yet we remain Wiiless.
Charles has taken it hard, and seems to be considering going into seclusion. I remain optimistic, but in an increasingly Grapes of Wrath-ish sort of way. Will I take the clerks’ advice and try again at the end of the week? I suppose I got to.

A second ago I needed graph paper. I went here, and suddenly I had some. Wow.
I’m sure that the existence of this site (and ones like it) is pretty well-known. But the awesomeness of having a need that the internet instantly fulfills can never be overstated.

I’ve now got an iSight camera built into the lid of my laptop. Naturally, I’ve been unable to resist the urge to play with it, so I spent about a minute on Wednesday morning writing a Perl script designed to take a steady stream of images. Then I let it run throughout the day. The results are pretty creepy, like a drug-use montage. And, yeah, a little longer than I’d like — but there are special guest appearances beginning about halfway through.

Click To Play

The Benny Hill music seemed like a much funnier idea when I was in a post-flight delirium. You should probably just mute it. Oh, and the weird chewing is from the cough drops that I was downing with disgusting regularity.

Lots of other people have taken videos like this one, and I’m sure there are better methods. But if you’re curious to try it yourself, here’s how I did it:

1. Download and install iSightCapture.
2. Copy this perl script to an empty directory and run it from there. Use control-C to stop it when you’ve taken enough shots.
   

   #!/usr/bin/perl
   while(1==1)
   {
   # grab a shot and name it in order
   my $time = time();
   `isightcapture $time.jpg`;
   # wait for one second. because of the
   # time isightcapture takes to run,
   # this results in roughly one exposure
   # every three seconds
   sleep(1);
   }

3. Download and compile JpegToAvi (it may be finicky about compiling on OS X — I had to run it from a Linux machine). Run the executable (while in the directory with all the JPEGs) like so:
   

   ls *.jpg | tr ‘\n’ ‘ ‘ | /path/to/jpegtoavi -f 30 640 480 > output.avi

4. Edit the AVI in your program of choice — I used iMovie to add the music and strip out the parts where we went for lunch or coffee. Then export it to a compressed format and upload it to your favorite video-sharing site. Don’t bother with YouTube: I tried it twice and with a variety of export formats, and it choked on the file each time, producing clips that were only one second long. Blip.tv worked great, though.

Well, I’m back home, or at least on the Dulles toll road. We landed almost an hour late, but the flight was mostly pleasant and uneventful. I did sit behind a human being with what may be the worst sense of taste I’ve ever encountered — and if you’ve ever heard one of my own full-throated defenses of the movie Predator, you know that’s saying something.
But picture, if you will, an individual watching a DVD set of the NBC series Las Vegas on her laptop. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night, desperate to have Nicki Cox distract you from the crushing weight of existence. But to see someone pay for the privilege of taking that experience with them anywhere… Well, it was troubling, at the least. Then, when I saw that the laptop was sitting next to a Lonely Planet guide to Florida, I knew that that pleasant-seeming lady was utterly doomed.
(I know that I’ve got friends, family and maybe readers in Florida. But c’mon — you know what I’m talking about.)
ALSO: can anyone explain to me why TSA insists on cell phones being turned off while you’re in the line for customs or waiting for your bags afterward? I can believe there may be a good reason, but like most air travel regulations on cellphones, I have a feeling it’s mostly just capricious, officious rulemaking. What could they be worried about, anyway? Someone cheating on their answers to the customs officials? “He’s asking me whether I brought back any fruit… I need an answer, quick!”